SCO’s Side of UnitedLinux

About a year ago, four big Linux companies, namely Connectiva, SCO, SuSE and Turbolinux got together to create one powerful version of Linux that would have the best of the four worlds. The outcome was called UnitedLinux, and each company used it to power its own Linux distribution. UnitedLinux has defined a common base (UL base) to be used as a foundation for Linux offerings from all the four groups. This is an effort towards standardizing Linux distros. Besides this, UnitedLinux also supports LSB (Linux Standard Base) and Open LiN18ux standards, where the latter is a standard for localization and internationalization. 

SCO Linux server 4’s desktop

In this article, we’ll talk about installing and configuring SCO Linux server 4, powered by

UnitedLinux. 

Being a server-based product, it does not include any desktop-related software such as multimedia or gaming. It has a lot of useful server software and a number of monitoring software like Nagios, Webalizer and Tripwire. On the Web server front, it has Apache and Tomcat 4. Finally, it has one-stop configuration tools like YaST2, Webmin and

Usermin. 

Installation using YaST2



Installing SCO Linux server 4 is quite simple. It uses YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) as the installer program, a proprietary SCO product. We installed it on an IBM Netfinity 5000 server, which had an UltraSCSI hard drive. The product comes in three CDs, and once you boot from the first one, it immediately goes into the graphical installation mode. Installation options are then presented, and you can select from Automatic, Manual or APIC (For Multi processors). The Automatic and Manual installation types are quiet similar except that the latter prompts the user for some USB modules before loading them. We tried the APIC installation on an IBM dual Xeon server and it installed like a dream. 

Installation with YaST. YaST is SCO’s proprietary installation program

In Automatic installation, it picks up the default settings and presents them to the user for any changes. Here, it first creates all Linux partitions, mounts existing Windows partitions of FAT-16/32 and NTFS (Read-only) file systems in the /windows folder. It then selects the default keyboard, mouse, time zone (US), and software packages. This information is presented to the user in a single window. You can then modify any of the settings by just selecting the corresponding hyperlinks.

Incidentally, a point we noted here was that the default installation doesn’t have the C++ compiler libraries. These are required when you need to compile the source code of particular software you want to install on it. 

After you’ve made changes to the installation settings, a few mouse clicks is all that are required to complete the installation. It restarts after completing the installation, and after the reboot, it automatically starts a configuration tool where you can define your users and passwords. It also searches for and configures the local printer and modem automatically. 

YaST’s graphical-mode configuration

Finally, it searches for your display adapter and loads the best driver and starts your X Window. By default, it starts in KDE and places icons for directly starting Webmin and

Usermin. 

We missed having a file browser icon for accessing the file system. 

We’ve discussed Webmin in detail on the next page. Usermin is a part of Webmin, and let’s you create and manage user accounts. 

Configuring with YaST



YaST is a complete configuration tool for the SCO Linux server, which let’s you install and configure any software, hardware, or configure networking on the server. It can be executed from the Run command from X Window, or from a terminal. From the Software section you can run software Update and manage the software packages in the SCO Linux Sever. The Hardware section gives you the options of configuring Graphics cards/Monitors, Printers and mouse. From the Network/basic and Network/Advance option, you can configure each and everything related to network like network card and modem, DSL and ISDN connections, DNS, DHCP, Proxy, Routing, etc. Security and Users option helps you create and manage users and groups. 

YaST’s text-mode configuration

With the System option you can configure bootloader, language, partition, etc. It also provides you with an option to use Logical Volume Manager (LVM). This is a subsystem for online-disk storage management. LVM supports volume management of disk and disk subsystems by grouping arbitrary disks into volume groups. 

The total capacity of volume groups can be allocated to logical volumes. It can have a maximium Logical Volume Size of 256 GB

using 4 MB clusters and can extend up to 1 PB using large Physical Extents.

Configuring with Webmin



Webmin has always been valued greatly by Linux users and can be used to configure just about every service in Linux. The SCO Linux Server comes with Webmin 1.024, which has been customized for it. As we mentioned, it can be launched straight from the KDE desktop, following which it starts up over a SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) connection using the localhost IP of 127.0.0.2:10000. Being completely GUI-based, it’s very easy to use. 

We’ll look at some of the important and new features added in this version of

Webmin. 

Configuring through webmin

One important aspect for any server is security, and open ports are the most common way of hacking into a system. So in the SCO Linux Server, you can block or keep monitoring all the open ports using

Webmin. 

To configure it, Start Webmin and select System tab and then select Security Sentries. Next, go to Port Sentry. It will start a form where you can manually enter the TCP and UDP ports on which the scan will work. 

You can also set the action that will be taken in case of any security flaw. These actions include blocking the port, ignoring the action or running some command from the configuration file. 

Another useful feature, we noticed, is a module called Nettalk Apple File/print Sharing, which allows connectivity with Macintosh systems. It works very well, and can be used to provide file and print servers to Mac systems–a good feature for a mixed

environment. 

For file sharing with Windows machines, there’s the ever popular Samba, which can also be configured through

Webmin.

There are lots of features in the server worth mentioning, such as support for up to 64 GB of memory, and installation on a 



8-way hardware server (containing 8 CPUs). It’s a very well packaged OS and doesn’t have any unnecessary utilities. This keeps the total installation size to about 2 GB, which is very moderate for
a server. 

Anindya Roy